SPLimitedAccessDiscovery

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

SPLimitedAccessDiscovery breaks down why some accounts show up on SharePoint sites as “Limited Access”. Limited Access means that the account doesn’t have access to the site itself, but it does have access somewhere within the site or within one of it’s child sites. Maybe somebody broke inheritance on a document in a document library, and granted a user to that document that doesn’t have access to the library or the site. That is why that user shows as having Limited Access, but it is really difficult to know where these unique permissions are set, and it could take hour of clicking around in the browser, trying to identify all the broken objects.

SPLimitedAccessDiscovery does this for you in mere seconds! Time is MONEY!

Technical Note: SPLimitedAccessDiscovery only crawls limited access at the site level and on down. I quickly noticed that if I crawl a whole site collection (farm is out of the question), the web request times out almost every time. This is even on a small site collection. Check out a permissions management tool like DeliverPoint if you need this kind of reporting at a larger scope. They have a great unique permissions report that shows all unique permissions, not just limited access. DeliverPoint's report can be scoped to the site, site collection, web application or farm level, and performs well too - and is really reasonably priced.

ADDITIONAL FEATURES

	The report generated shows the account given the limited access, the type of object that was found to have unique permissions, the title of the list and item, as well as a url to the object and its ID.
	You can clearly see how the limited access discovery report lines up to the site’s permission list. All the accounts that show up as “Limited Access” get broken down, and you’ll see listed all the objects that the account has access to. Those are the objects that have unique permissions (broken inheritance), which is causing the limited access to show on the site.
	Each object that shows in the report is linkable to the actual object, making it really easy to click through to that object and change permissions if necessary! Huge time saver!
	The solution is highly integrated right into SharePoint! Simply deploy a solution, activate a feature, and click the “Limited Access Discovery” link on any site settings page! SO EASY!